


The Trappings (And The Woes)

by billspilledquill



Category: Hamlet - All Media Types, Hamlet - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Body Swap, Gen, Hamlet loved his mother fight me on that, Kissing, M/M, Panic Attacks, Pining, Pre-Play, Russian Literature, Wittenberg
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 14:29:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15798444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/billspilledquill/pseuds/billspilledquill
Summary: Horatio wakes in Hamlet’s bed.InHamlet.Somehow, that is the normal part of the week.





	The Trappings (And The Woes)

 

Horatio wakes in Hamlet’s bed. _In_ Hamlet.

He stirs, stares, because it seems that Hamlet never sleeps. He looks down, his hands dark, soft, and not his. Not fucking his.

Something catches in his throat, which is not his. Not fucking his.

Horatio turns, turns again, he blinks, catching the posters and the well-stacked books in shelves. It sinks. His head still clouded by sleep. His head that is not his tell him to be fucking panicked. Fear is the best place to start. Hamlet. Fear. _Not his, not his, not his._

Fear. Fear, fear, fear, fear. He blots out from the covers, because this doesn’t feel like him, this doesn’t feel like his hands, his eyes, his hair. Feel, feel, feel— oh god, oh god, _god_ and whatever and whomever is gracious and good and normal. He doesn’t feel like breathing.

He can’t fucking breathe.

He stumbles around, unsteady and wobbled. What the fuck. What the fuck. What the fuck. He is weak, he is weak, he is weak. His limbs are not fucking working, they are loud and heavy and his bones hurt, the stretch of breaking veins, all beneath, all above. He can’t breathe. This is how you breathe— this is how not you fucking breathe, you fucking bastard. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop, stop, stop, stop—

_FEAR, FEAR, FEAR, FEAR._

He holds something. There’s something. Yes, turn it. Turn the handle like a normal person. Yes. This is how— yes, turn the shower. Disappear. Go away. Go the fuck away.

Should have died yesterday, his mind that is not his says. Disappear. Disappear. The thoughts crossing his mind are not his. Nothing in this in his, nothing of these tears and sweat are his—

“Horatio.”

Showers. Yes. The water talks and speaks his name— something— there’s a verse in Pope, where is that—

“ _Horatio!_ ”

A hand comes up to his face, and it’s his face. “Horatio, listen,” a face that is Horatio, and he is talking to him. What the fuck. His voice says, “Horatio, calm down.”

Horatio says something, a little louder, and he is screaming. The fear mounts and conquers him without the need to surrender. He is the fear. His heart drops. Is that what Hamlet feels every time he wake up?

What is Hamlet afraid of?

“God,” Horatio’s own face moves and his lips thin, a pale leave. Were they always this thin? “I forgot how much of an ass I am in the morning.”

“Hamlet,” he says, trembling.

“It’s me, yeah. It’s been an odd day.”

The shower starts, and Hamlet looks respectfully composed and embarrassed at the same time.

“Sorry, uh,” his face and his mouth say. “I usually get better after a shower or two. I will wait you outside.”

His own blonde hair is damp, and he thinks, in his infinite shame and in the chaos of a mind absent of coercion or coherent thoughts, of a kicked puppy away from home.

He barely had time to nod when the bathroom door closed with a loud thud. Hamlet has never looked so calm in his entire life.

As the water drops streamed down his face and he took account of his worn face, he realized that he had never had been like this, neither. Hamlet.

Hamlet.

 

*

 

“Do you want to talk about this,” Horatio says after he comes out, the stream tainting Hamlet’s cheeks pink and hollow. Hamlet sits on his bed with Horatio’s body, pale and tall. “Or is it something else that you are supposed to hide?”

“The fact that we are currently sharing bodies?”

“The fact that I just had a breakdown in the early morning and you acted as if it was a common thing that happen to you every other day.”

Hamlet flickers his wrists, Horatio’s wrists. “I have never felt healthier, I don’t like it.”

“Okay,” he says, “so we are not talking about this.”

Hamlet stares at his stomach, and takes his gaze away quickly. A bird’s inquiry. Horatio’s hands wonder down on this new body, marks. He touches, and winces.

“Don’t speak the speech, I pray you,” Hamlet says, soft. Gold doesn’t suit him, he wonders. All that glitters.

“Okay,” he says.

Hamlet’s weight makes the bed creak. He balances his two legs, back and forth. Pale fingers digging into the mattress. It is strange, odd even, to be able to look at Hamlet without feeling infatuation boiling down somewhere, down in his dark circles, down in his smooth dark palms.

“I am a prince,” he declares.

“Well,” Horatio says, walking with the towel still hanging between his thighs. “I am sure that this won’t be a problem.”

“No,” Hamlet says, his eyes glittering. Gold, he thinks. Horatio never knew he ever could look this way. “I am sure it won’t.”

 

*

 

Rosencrantz is smiling at him.

“My lord,” he greets, his sack full, his steps light. The clinks of coins followed. “You look rather enlightened today.”

“Head,” Guildenstern mutters.

Horatio doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t.

“Of course, enlightenment means Locke,” Rosencrantz says, waving his hands. “Empirical evidence, my lord, I have heard that you were a fan of Hobbes.”

“Head,” a whisper again.

“An amateur,” he says, hopes it’s the right thing.

Rosencrantz looks at him, his grey eyes solemn. He turns to Guildenstern, staring intently at the nickel, “Is it still head?” His friend nods. The grey eyes gaze over.

“With all due respect, my lord,” he says, lashes modestly turning downwards, “you really do look very enlightened today.”

“It’s hardly an offense,” he arches an eyebrow, taking over their expressions.

“He means that you never talk to us,” Guildenstern says. “Ah,” he stares down at his palm. “Still head.”

Rosencrantz’s glasses falls a little when the lines around his mouth drop. “Guildenstern,” he warns.

Horatio, hands still full of books, gestures vaguely at the exit. “I will see you around, yes?”

Rosencrantz’s lips open, close, and then opens them again, “Yeah,” he says, voice flat, his eyes impossibly curious. “Yeah.”

Surely, he had said something wrong, and before he can say anything to redeem himself, Guildenstern is looking between them, eyes wide.

“It’s still head,” he says, incredulous.

 

*

 

“Do you like Hobbes?” He asks when Hamlet is sitting on his table again, a collection of poems in his hand, his foot dangling at the edge of the chair. It’s his room, Horatio tells himself. It’s not like he is any better, sleeping in Hamlet’s bed and all.

He is out of choices, he reminds himself. So he touches Hamlet’s knee, until the blue eyes startle, and a light blush settle between the cheeks.

“I hate your body sometimes, Horatio,” Hamlet says to his book, his nose buried in it.

“Do you like Hobbes?” He repeats.

Hamlet’s eyes look up, he laughs. “Words, words, words. I love words.”

“Wild and whirling,” he says. “You are not answering my question,” he says, and puts a little pressure on his knee. It’s my body, anyway.

Hamlet’s hand surprises him by placing it on his own. “Rosencrantz’s been around, hasn’t he.” It is so frustrating, Horatio thinks, he can have his face and still be Hamlet. It is so, so tiring.

“I don’t know how to be a lord,” he admits.

“Well, first, never ask anyone this question,” Hamlet answers, a smile on his face. “I am sure you will get used to it, my lord.”

“You are silly.”

“I have never felt better, Horatio,” Hamlet stretches, his hand leaving his, caws in the air, a cat in the sun. “You have a nice body.”

“You just said you didn’t like it.”

“I like yours better than mine,” he replies, as if it is explanation enough.

“Your two friends are rambling in the lecture hall. It is quite disturbing.”

“I see that you are beginning to adapt into my mind,” he says.

If it is a praise, Horatio ignored it. “Just wait until I will have to go back to Elsinore, and your father crowns me king,” he whispers, considering murder already.

“Father is still young,” he smiles. Horatio never really liked his smile, but Hamlet’s moves his lips wide, his tongue licking the upper lip, and he decides that it is charming enough to not to feel narcissistic about it. “Besides, it is not like I am old enough.”

“You miss your mother too, I presume.”

“I do,” Hamlet’s lips twist into a grin. “Now,” he yawns, an expression so foreign to Horatio. Hamlet never sleeps. “Let’s make you a lord.”

“What?”

Hamlet carefully marks his Pushkin poems, and pushes himself upright on the table. And jumps right off it.

And he takes his hand, kneels before him, his head bowing.

Horatio staggers. Hamlet looks unfazed, his face suddenly closed, his kneeling almost a coronation. His king looks up to him, and Horatio almost falls right here, right now, because he is not a priest, and none of them are more than a child and a student. Fear catches back in his stomach. Not his.

What in the world can Hamlet be afraid of?

The bookshelves are all around him, and it has always been like this. Hamlet taking him somewhere beneath the pages, in between the words and here, his hand warm, and bookshelves again.

Hamlet is looking up, but Horatio knows who is holding this tread. Between life or death, Hamlet will always hold the line. He tugs, and Horatio falls.

“You don’t know what you are doing,” Horatio says to himself.

And so Hamlet holds his hands tighter, the tip of his fingers, touching the inside of his palms. Long live the king, he almost uttered.

“My lord,” Hamlet says. “My sweet lord.”

Hamlet leads his hand on his head. He is always leading, Hamlet is in control of everything that is between them, and he pulls the string too much, too much, it’s too much. Horatio’s finger tightens around his curls. It’s his. The hand is not his. The crown is not his. The cloth is not his.

Hamlet is not _his_.

“My lord,” Horatio starts, the words taste familiar in his mouth. Hamlet glares, and so he shuts up.

Hamlet shakes his head, resting it on Horatio’s left leg.

“Hamlet, please.” he recedes. “Get up.”

“That’s good,” was his muffled response. “Now,” he says, determined. “Say it again.”

He relents, feeling his tongue dragging between his teeth. “This is enough, Hamlet.”

Hamlet raises his eyes, “I will die for you.” Something catches in his breath, and Horatio knows his body damn well, too well, in fact. Fire burns, and he isn’t water.

“Hamlet–“

“I would die for you,” he says, “my lord.”

And it _bursts_.

“Enough!” And he pulls Hamlet up, yanks him back to where he is supposed to be. “Get up.”

This is combustible, he thinks, the skin burning against his. Hamlet is fire, and he is a broken branch fallen from a sparrow’s arch.

Horatio averts his gaze, his hand still circling Hamlet’s wrist. There is a dreadful silence, until Hamlet made it worse by laughing it off, a stricken voice, loud, and not at all like Horatio’s.

“Here,” Hamlet says. “Now you know how to order people. Be precise. Never be phased by these declarations, my good friend. They are all lies.”

“You didn’t mean them,” he says, hopeful.

Hamlet hums, putting his cheek to where Horatio’s hand rests. “My lord,” he starts. He can feel his smile by the way his cheek move. “My sweet lord.”

“You didn’t mean them,” he repeats, a little forcefully. He has been repeating things all his life. You won’t die, he thinks. What is a prince to do with immortality?

“Devote yourself to life, Horatio, nothing else matter,” Hamlet says, taking on a paper, folding it in half, then more, “the crown is only good on people with a wife to take and a brother to lose.”

I will die for you, Hamlet says. And you will live for me. Hamlet has always been selfish. Hamlet has always been living for death for so, so long.

“To be,” Hamlet folds it again, until it turns into a wobbled paper crown. “That’s your philosophy.”

And his cheeks turn to Horatio again, puts the paper crown upon his head. The window is not closed, and a soft wind shakes the clipped paper to the floor. The soft crack of a turned heel, and Horatio calls out, the back of Hamlet’s head as his front view.

“Our philosophy,” he reminds him.

Hamlet doesn’t turn back, instead makes a little tilt toward the sun. The window is still open. The wind clouds him blind. “You are learning fast,” he hear him say.

 

*

 

Rosencrantz tugs at his sleeve when Horatio is searching for Onegin in the library.

“Looking for Pushkin, my lord?” He says, resting a finger on the cover he is holding. _Mozart and Salieri, A Poetic Short._

“For—“ Hamlet. He’s been reading only Russian literature lately. A fancy strike, to say the least. “Why, yes. I am. Onegin, in fact,” he says, clasping his hands behind his back. Tries his best to look like a prince and Hamlet at the same time. “Guildenstern is not with you,” he points out.

“He is busing counting coins,” he shrugs, taking one book out of the shelve. “I’d think you would prefer _The Stone Guest_ more, my lord.”

“Are you mocking me?” He frowns, “I am looking for Onegin.”

Rosencrantz’s smile falters only in its sincerity, “Of course,” he says. “Stay here my lord, I will look it for you.”

“You don’t need to–“

“I insist,” he says. “Now, sit, my good lord.”

And when he comes back with a slim, worn book in his possession, Rosencrantz is grinning at him, a malicious glint in his eyes.

“We went to see the opera with your little friend, my lord, do you remember?”

“Horatio?” He says, thinking hard. “Ah, yes, I do.”

“We are hardly friends, my lord, but hear me out,” he reaches out, the book tapping lightly against Horatio’s shoulder. “Horatio is a good fellow, but–“

“But what, Rosencrantz?” An arm touches his. It’s Hamlet, and he doesn’t look very pleased. “Do you have a problem with me?”

Rosencrantz stares at their intertwined arms. “I don’t, my friend.”

“Then mind your own damn business, my good, good friend,” Hamlet says, already turning and dragging Horatio out of the way. “Now excuse me, we have other things to do than to hear about your moaning about your spite for me.”

He peers back, and Rosencrantz gives him a smile, if not a lewd one. All the devils are here, he thinks, the claws of one clinging unto him like a lifeline.

“That’s not how I speak,” Horatio says, out of breath. They are almost running. This body doesn’t seem to be accustomed to physical activity. “You have to try harder.”

“Well,” Hamlet answers, crossing his arms, “did you wish me to stay silent and complacent like _you_ usually do when they try to warn me about _your_ corrupt mind?”

He sighs, “We both know that they are only jesters, my lord.”

“There’s no lord here, my lord.”

“Hamlet—“

He snatches the book away. “Thank you for picking it up,” Hamlet says, his voice softening on the edges. “I needed it.”

“It’s been awhile since we went to see the opera,” he observes. “Tchaikovsky’s music was magnificent.”

“You are missing the point,” Hamlet says. “That whole opera was staged to see my reaction for dueling. Laetres is an interesting brother for Ophelia, but he is unfortunately very stupid.”

“I don’t think it’s wrong for him to check on you if you are Ophelia’s boyfriend and a prince of a like, real country,” he amends.

“I get that,” Hamlet waves the book in the air. “But staging a play and all an orchestra just to look at my face? It’s is ridiculous.”

“Come,” Hamlet says, walking in front of him. He always does. “Let me read it to you. I bet you don’t know about the stanza in the end, how it flows and breaks through the bastard’s feelings—“

And so he doesn’t tell him that he had once studied Pushkin for two semesters, and lets him. He always lets him.

A single leaf which has outlasted, its season will be trembling still, he thinks, and hides the copy of Anna Karenina for himself.

Hamlet’s hands are heavy and steps light. His existence is an antithesis, and Horatio rejoices in it, a metaphor, he thinks. A metaphor.

 

*

 

“I am sleeping in your room.”

“What?”

“So you go sleep in mine,” he says. “It’s like a game between siblings, right?”

So Horatio ends up in Hamlet’s room, surrounded by dried flowers and worn books, realizing that his brothers were all dead before the age of ten, and that Hamlet never had a sibling, as well.

 

*

 

Hamlet kissed him once before this odd and rather uncomprehending metamorphosis. Overjoyed by Ophelia’s reply— her letter lying on the table— he has grabbed him by the collar, and kissed him. His dark hands clutching at his jacket, shaking with anticipation, joy and something else. His dark curls a mess on his shoulder. Ophelia answered me, he said. Horatio. Ophelia, Ophelia, Ophelia.

Horatio hated it, the feeling of wet, soft lips on his. It reminded him of all the times he wished to do so, and never did, and never will.

Then the second time he kissed him, he had pale fingers and blonde hair and a face just like Horatio’s.

It is a letter, too. Hamlet storms into his room (it was Hamlet’s after all), and kissed him with all the fervor of a blind man yearning for the light.

The tremblings are even more present, and Horatio wonders if they can’t be intimate without being shaken to the core, without a feeling of disarray and on the edge of a precipice. Hamlet is crying.

He tries to let go, because it’s been minutes and he can’t breathe, but Hamlet catches on, he presses on, and he is desperate.

“Hamlet, please—” he says, opening his mouth only to be pushed in again. “Hamlet!”

His friend startles, his eyes wide and blue. They are mine, he thinks. The tears are his. “What’s wrong?”

“Horatio, we have to turn back to ourselves, I can’t be in this body anymore,” he says more than he screams. “Quick, quick, kiss me now, and I don’t know, maybe something like a intergalactic soul transformation will happen again, Horatio—“

A sob breaks out, and he has no choice but to take him in his arms.

He takes, albeit with some difficulty, because his arms are a lot shorter now— takes Hamlet in, and rocks them back and forth, slowly. The crying doesn’t subside, but the breathing does, and it is enough for now.

“Ah, fuck it, I don’t have time for this!” A scream. And the breathing quickens. “Horatio, kiss me, Horatio—“

“Tell me,” he says, cupping his face. “What’s wrong?”

Hamlet kisses him as an answer. It is bitter and too warm. It is not a kiss at all. A ghost would embrace someone better with the wind.

“Damn it, damn it, damn it, why it doesn’t work?” He digs his fingers into Horatio’s flesh, the sting of it cutting edges. It’s his flesh, maybe that’s why Hamlet doesn’t mind. “The last time I kissed you and the next day we are like this, Horatio.” And he bites his lips until the blood drips from his chin. “Horatio, Horatio, kiss me again—“

“Hamlet, that’s enough,” he says, with all the authority he can muster, a king would look up to him. A king with tears streaming down his face, and a bloody lip. He pushes him a little too hard when Hamlet tries again, “Enough!”

Hamlet looks at him, agape. He stumbles back. The blood smears his face, and it seems as if he had just ate a man, and knowing him, maybe it is true. “My lord,” Hamlet says, not a hint of sarcasm in his voice this time. A horrible sense of veneration in it. “My lord.”

And they stare into each other’s facing wall for a whole minute, until Hamlet drops to his knees again, and, taking his hands, a little crazy and a little mad. And it hits him, the question he’s been asking himself for so, so long.

This is what Hamlet feared. This is why he is afraid.

“My father is dead,” he says. “I need you to kiss me.”

The madness. This is madness. Hamlet has been mad for a very, very long time. And that fear that is not his creeps back, and Hamlet is on his knees, that damning letter, drunk on madness.

“Will that make you feel better?”

“I am a prince,” he declares. “You are a lord. None of us is above the law. I am Horatio, and you’re too. You need to kiss me.”

I’ll die for you, he thinks, and kneels down, bringing their foreheads together. A chorus in his mind. The king is dead, long live the king.

“Do it, then,” Horatio says, and pretend he is mad too.

The blood slips through his teeth, and it tastes like salt.

 

*

 

He wears all black for the occasion.

“I need you to mourn for me, my lord,” Hamlet says, he has been calling him this ever since. “It is not just an inky cloth. The dark clouds had fallen,” he quotes. “And I am trapped inside the sky.”

“You have been reading Onegin again,” he remarks.

“I have been reading,” Hamlet says, and the circles under his eyes return after a week of disappearance.

The funeral is staged in Elsinore. But Horatio wore black at the sunniest day in the year, and Hamlet only nods whenever someone calls him. Something is dead here too, he wants to say, but doesn’t know how. And it is rotting like a year old corpse.

“I loved my father,” Hamlet says, one day. “I loved him.”

Horatio doesn’t mention the past tense or the coldness of the tone or that it is the only thing he had said in a whole day. He settles back into his seat, and tries to think what Hamlet will write to Ophelia if he were sane and not mad.

“Doubt the stars are fire, doubt that the sun does move, doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt I love,” he reads. “Nice piece. It is okay for me to transcript that to Ophelia? She has been waiting for your letter ever since.

“The stars _are_ fire,” Hamlet says, and just like that, the conversation is over.

 

*

 

“You will go to Elsinore without me, Horatio,” Hamlet says without looking up from his book. “Do remember to wear black.”

“I thought you would like to see your mother,” he dares. Hamlet curls his fingers in guise of a pistol.

“Count to ten and I will let you kill me,” he says. “And I will not miss her. At all.”

He tries to discern smoke out of Hamlet’s pistol, and knows that he is maybe a little mad too, after all.

“Your mother is mourning too, I am sure,” he hears himself say. “I will act according to the custom.”

“It is not acting, Horatio,” Hamlet says, showing his teeth. He closes his eyes as if he wish to be blind. The book is open. The window makes the wind shift. The pages turn without a care. “I am not an actor.”

“You will have to tell me how to be you,” he admits. “I am not you.”

“You are a better me,” Hamlet says, turning the pages back to where they have started. “I am a superfluous being.”

“Eugene Onegin,” Horatio points out, a little tired. “What’s up with your fixation for him?”

“He died,” he says simply. “That’s enough reason for me.”

 

*

 

Rosencrantz gave him a nickel when Horatio was making his travel case. For good luck, he says.

My lord, he says. You look very good today. And as he left him, Horatio drops the coin. He looks down, dropping his gaze to the floor. A prayer.

It’s head.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. This is a bad story that came out from my bad writer block, please bear with me.   
> 2\. A birthday present. He knows who he is. 
> 
> Comments are very welcomed!


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